Saturday, 12 November 2016

After Brexit the BBC must be purged of the superficial children who run it

If you want someone or something to blame for Brexit (if indeed blame is the right word) I would point the finger at the BBC. Specifically BBC radio comedy. Because the UK does not have a competitive radio market we have only one serious radio station which is pretty much the voice of the establishment. Radio 4. It has a captive prime time audience of commuters stuck in traffic.

There is an almost Orwellian subtext to Radio 4 whereby the bias is the most subtle of biases. Bias by omission. Crucial information is left our in order to weave a very one sided narrative and they have always picked the very worst people to represent the opposing arguments.

Radio 4 comedy however provides the end of week editorial slant which for as long as I can remember has been a delivery mechanism for far left toxic bilge and climate alarmism. I remember being so irritated by Sandy Dogsick and that ghastly rodent Andy Hamilton that I actually punched the radio off switch in the car so hard that the radio stopped working.

And then there's the Now Show which is basically europhile's half hour whereby for years the eurosceptic is portrayed a bumbling middle aged conspiracy theorist and Nigel Farage is the butt of every joke. If you want lefty condescension then Radio 4 is where you will find it.

As you know I have not had any Ukip sympathies for many many years but Radio 4 was keen to tar them with the xenophobia brush long before they actually were xenophobic. Worse still, were the planted and manufactured nontroverseies. It's actually little wonder that at the first opportunity to vote on the subject that middle England would present the middle finger.

There was a time when BBC lefty comedy was edgy. I remember Ben Elton's The Man From Auntie, at the height of Thatcherism. That's when we started to see The Mary Whitehouse Experience making waves, paving the way for four successful careers in comedy.

This is when the BBC comedy went into stasis. At some point between the end of the Thatcher era and the mid nineties, the underdog left became the mainstream establishment in the BBC and it has tainted their output ever since. This is why the BBC has been utterly incapable of producing any groundbreaking comedy in the last decade.

Good comedy is comedy that treads on taboos and goes counter to mainstream culture. The BBC was unable to recognise that these tiresome lefties had become the establishment and rather than challenging the status quo they were the mouthpiece of it. This is why they couldn't wait to get rid of Clarkson and this is why they struggle to replace him.

And when it comes to more serious politics, they don't have a balanced output. The only remotely sceptical conservative voice they have is Andrew Neil, who is somewhat superficial but he's the best any conservative could hope for from the BBC. He is the licensed dissident in the same way that JB Priestly was the only voice on the BBC who could criticise Churchill during the war. In many respects the BBC is still the same ossified mouthpiece of orthodoxy that it has always been.

As to its referendum coverage, Newsnight was too unbearably smug to watch. As fact free as it was, it is the result of a gradual hollowing out of journalism where the presenters are cardboard cut outs with about as much substance, aided by a staff of juvenile interns and junior researchers with virtually no experienced journalists on staff, save for the odious Jonty Bloom who is a straight up liar.

One could understand this dynamic were the BBC faced with the commercial pressures of having to compete but it has vast sums of public money lavished upon it yet has voluntarily debased itself in the ratings war. To my mind, if it wants to compete with commercial television - and by so doing produce the same content, then it should be a commercial station. If it has abandoned impartiality and any public service remit, along with any obligation to produce high quality journalism then there is no longer a rationale for public funding.

We have heard all the same tiresome mantras about reforming the BBC but we know the BBC is as likely to be reformed as the EU. Not unless you take a wrecking ball to it will it undergo any serious introspection. Personally I would like to see the BBC go back to setting the standards for adult television, abandoning the twenty four hour news cycle and instead focus on just two news programmes a day dedicated to adding depth to events of the day.

The fact is we do not need the BBC to tell us what has happened, nor do we need celebrity hacks to emote about it. If we want superficial tripe we are spoiled for choice. If there is any point to the BBC then it is to add value rather than to add to the white noise. If the BBC wants to survive then it must regain its authority and its integrity. Before it can do that though, there must be a purge of the self-serving leftist children who run it. Maybe then we can once again have a BBC we are proud of.